Blog for hpHosts, and whatever else I feel like writing about ....

Saturday 30 July 2011

Be careful searching for Top Gear episodes

Love Top Gear? I do to, can't wait for Sundays and Wednesdays, and tend to watch it on Dave through the week (seen them all hundreds of times since they're repeated around 5 times a day, but bah, there's normally nothing else on anyway). However, if you're searching for Top Gear episodes (thought everyone knew the official URL (http://bbc.co.uk/topgear), but obviously not), then you may find yourself coming across this;

watchtopgear.info
IP: 50.22.42.159

IP PTR: 50.22.42.159-static.reverse.softlayer.com
ASN: 36351 50.22.0.0/18 SOFTLAYER - SoftLayer Technologies Inc.

There are many variations for other TV programs (watchthesimpsons.info existed a while back for example), and they all inevitably lead to Zango (aka Pinball Publisher Corp, Pinball Corporation), which is PPI (Pay Per Install) adware.

Sometimes, these have been known to install silently, other times, you'll see something like this;



Whatever it is you are looking for, do yourself a favour, and your machine a favour - stay well away from this rubbish, it isn't good for your sanity, and isn't good for your machine.

The real Top Gear site is here;

http://bbc.co.uk/topgear

Hat tip to LOON3R for the heads up.

1 comment:

Andrew from Vancouver said...

So, watchthebiggestloser.com on the same IP address is no good? Darn, because the resulting page for:

https://secure.signup-page.com/p06/?siteid=3853

Seemed like such a deal, whereby I could just give away my email address and with NO Spyware or AdWare I could get satellite tv on my own computer.

Ugh. And these marketers are paying real money; that secure-signup-page.com is hosted at prolexic.com which is in the business of being a CDN with DDoS mitigation.